Newfoundland Road Trip

The rooms at the Captain's Inn in Old Perlican, Newfoundland (population 800) were spartan but spotless. My partner Lisa and I unpacked and headed to the dinning room where the innkeeper, Carol Strong, fussed over our dinner of fried cod tongues, boiled potatoes and sweet corn. She asked if we planned on going out after we ate. Since the wind was rattling the windows. I declined.
"You're the only ones here tonight so I'm going home. Help yourselves to the bar and anything else you need. I'll be back about nine tomorrow morning," she said, tossing me the keys to the hotel.

That's the first for me. I've never had an innkeeper throw me the keys to their establishment so they could go home for the night. But this was Newfoundland.

We arrived on The Rock's west coast by ferry from Nova Scotia and drove a Chevy Silverado 900 kilometers across the province to St John's with one goal in mind: find the best one-day drive loop out of North America's oldest city. That limited us to the Avalon Peninsula, a wind swept jut of rock hanging off the southeast corner of Canada's most easterly province.

After studding the road map. We set out for the Baccalieu Trail, a 400 km drive around the perimeter of the Avalon's northern finger that separates Trinity and Conception Bay.

The first 90 km took us west along the Trans-Canada Highway, a good stretch to enjoy the rolling countryside dotted with small pristine lakes that the locals call ponds and erratics - huge boulders dropped by age old glaciers creeping south. It also provided a chance to figure out what to except at our first stop, a place called Dildo.

The tidy fishing community keeps busy processing cod, herring, whales, seals, squid and even milk of all things. Dildonians' pride in their village is apparent, but aside from a string of smirks and innuendoes, we never did find out how the name originated.
North of Dildo, the two-lane paved road wrapped the coast thought the likes of Heart's Desire and Heart's Content, where the first transatlantic cable was laid.

Then we saw it, ground in a cove where the afternoon sun turned it an eerie fluorescent, bluish-white.

Towering 40 meters out of Greenland ice looked more like something from another planet than my preconceived idea of an iceberg.
It was after this stop that we pulled into Old Perlican four hours after leaving St. John's and checked into the Captain's Inn. We took a blustery stroll thought the village, past the fish processing plant, one of the most successful in all of newfound land.

The moratorium on cod fishing forced fishermen to concentrate on snow crab, resulting in staggering yields that are sold to the Japanese businessmen on the other side of the planet.

In the morning we stopped for fuel at a station where the local policeman bombarded us with questions about the Chevy Silverado that we were driving. Five minutes later Mr. policeman was treating Lisa to a coffee while I was out in the parking lot playing with the squad car.

The officer suggested we take the coast route to Grates Cove, the next stop on our trek. The 15 km dirt road featured more sightings of gargantuan icebergs: some surrounded by growles and bergy bits, charming names for smaller pieces of icebergs that had broken off from the "mother ship". It was drive thought the ultimate Disney-like attraction, created by Mother Nature, not Mickey Mouse.

The village of Grates Cove sits at the northernmost point of the Avalon Peninsula, where the trees give way to stunted shrubs and bald rock faces. Legend has it that John Cabot first landed here and left an inscription in a rock supposedly stolen by some "media people" in the 1960's. With almost as many graveyards and churches as houses, Gates Cove felt like the end of the earth.

From Gates Cove, the trail winds south along the coast of Conception Bay. Every turn held a surprise. Gigantic icebergs shimmering in the dazzling spring sunshine and humpback whales breached in the distance. Our Silverado carried us through Burt Point, Blackhead and Blow Me Down out-laying communities set in a wonderland of water, rock and ice. Carbonear, the commercial centre for the Baccalieu Trail, is saturated with folklore ranging from Irish princesses to seal hunts gone bad. After a good soaking, we continued south to an airfield on top of a hill overlooking the town of Harbor Grace.

The grass strip was built in 1927 as a launch point for most of the first transatlantic flights as well as a fueling stop for the early around the world attempts. This was where Amelia Earhart took off on her perilous 15-hour flight to Londonderry, Northern Ireland, securing her spot in the history books as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

We continued south thought Spaniard's Bay, Black Duck Pond and Cupids, the first English settlement in North America. Then inland over the barrens to the Trans-Canada Highway and back to St. John's where we checked into the luxurious Hotel Newfoundland with its panoramic views of the city and harbor for the final night of the journey.

The room was posh. We swam in the indoor pool then relaxed in the hot tub. Everyone was amiable; the food was fabulous and the service impeccable. But no one offered us the keys to the joint and said they would be back in the morning.
That, we figured, was a Newfoundland option reserved only for the Baccalieu Trail.